WOMEN IN THE CLASSROOM:

school cultural practices and the formation of student identities

Abstract

This article aims to analyze how school cultural practices are decisive in shaping female identities within the classroom. The study, of bibliographic nature, was developed based on theorists of the New Cultural History, as this framework allows us to examine more specific issues of everyday life, such as norms, practices, and pedagogical discourses that take place in the educational setting. Our focus turns to the specificities of female education, particularly the routines enacted throughout the schooling process, which permeate the construction of habitus, in Bourdieu’s (2009) conception, intertwined with the social context. The study engages with authors such as Certeau (1998), Perrot (2017), and Louro (1997–2004), among others, and contributes to discussions through both macro and micro-historical perspectives. This approach enables us to explore how representations embedded in school material culture contributed to the dissemination of models of femininity and how female students interacted with them. We conclude that the school, while a space of normalization and reproduction of feminine habitus, is also a site of tactics, where students resignify daily life and construct diverse identities, marked by intersections of class, race, religion, and other social categories.